Georges St. Pierre's "Fragile Chin": Is It Good Enough for Middleweight?

BJ Penn's recent victory over Diego Sanchez has once again resurrected the debate over the pound-for-pound comparisons between BJ and his personal white whale, Georges St. Pierre.

In this debate, if there is any one thing that GSP gets dumped on for, it is his supposedly weak chin.

To be fair to these charges, getting knocked out by a natural lightweight is never indicative of a truly great chin, but it's hardly enough to convince me that GSP's chin is actually weak.

St. Pierre fans will point out that it took a lot of punches from Serra before the fight was actually stopped, and even then, Georges wasn't unconscious. To them, the fight is actually indicative of a chin that is very good.

My personal interpretation of the incident in question?

Matt Serra may be a natural lightweight, but he throws big wild and heavy punches that are going to hurt a fighter if they land.  Even BJ Penn didn't exactly move forward in the instances when he was hit by Serra.

The problem wasn't ever with GSP's chin, but rather with his mentality.

When fighters throw big hay-makers, the strikes are telegraphed, and therefore are a lot easier to dodge.

Georges St. Pierre should never have allowed himself to get hit by those wild heavy punches, and for the most part, he won't get hit by those kinds of shots.  At the time, he felt fairly invincible, and didn't respect Matt Serra's power.

Since he has come to respect the power of his opponents, he is now a lot harder to knock out.

GSP also wasn't prepared mentally for a fight against Matt Serra. That doesn't mean that he is mentally weak, it simply means that he had the wrong thoughts in his head during that fight.

As a result of this lack of mental preparation, he couldn't come up with any plan to recover and get his way back into the fight.  This is a mistake that GSP seems to have used as a positive lesson.

If there is a fight that shows off St. Pierre's mental strength, and the strength of his chin, it is indeed his first fight against BJ Penn, where he was beaten up in the first round, but found a way to survive and win.

If there was any weakness shown in that fight, it was not the weakness of his chin or mind, but rather the weakness of his skin, which was busted up by BJ's eye-gouging punches.

Despite this performance, and subsequent performances where GSP has taken flush shots and gone on to win, detractors still say that GSP has a weak chin, and that because of it, he wouldn't be able to move up in weight like BJ Penn is sometimes successfully able to do.

Looking for an example to counter this argument doesn't require digging through the archives of obscure MMA artists who have moved up in weight.  Instead, consider Manny Pacquiao.

At one time, people doubted Pacquiao's chin, and also his punching power at the higher weight classes. The man who was once knocked out by a 106-pound Rustico Torrecampo, has now gone on to easily absorb 144-pound Miguel Cotto's best punches, and has shown legitimate punching power in the higher weight classes.

Obviously, there are other examples where fighters go up in weight an are not successful, but I'm hardly convinced that Georges St. Pierre's chin wouldn't hold up at middleweight, at least given how hard it is to land repeated punches on him.

I'm also not convinced that he wouldn't have the power to hurt middleweights with his own punches, or that he wouldn't be able to take them down.

From the rumors spread by Joe Rogan during UFC broadcasts, we've heard that Georges St. Pierre has already been very successful in taking down larger teammates like Rashad Evans, who is hardly the worst wrestler in the 205-pound division, and who himself was able to wrestle fairly evenly with Tito Ortiz.

All things considered, I feel confident that GSP would be more than capable of surviving in the middleweight division, supposedly weak chin and all.